Fuck you, Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura, for making me almost cry on the F train. Seriously, I was like this close. Fuck you for writing the Bridge to Terabithia of comics.

I’ve written a lot of negative reviews recently, and a lot of the positive reviews I’ve written have been half-hearted at best. It’s been a long time since I got to write a rave about a book I didn’t suspect beforehand I was going to love. I Kill Giants is why I read comics.

It’s about a fifth-grade girl named Barbara who’s a little undersized, friendless, and really weird. She plays D&D instead of hanging out with kids her age. She gets sent to the principal’s office for disrupting career day—because she already has a career, thank you very much, giant-killing—and then to the school psychologist’s office. She carries a magical giant-killing hammer named Coveleski, after a turn-of-the-2oth-century baseball player. Her sister looks after her and her brother and there’s an unspeakable horror living upstairs.

Childhood escapes from troubled home lives into fantasy are hardly unexplored territory, but Kelly and Niimura execute Barbara’s perfectly. The sense of genuine menace builds as elements of Barbara’s imagination come to life in the real world. Giants are coming, and her crudely drawn familiars can’t help her, they can only die. The major villain, when he appears, would be terrifying to a child.